When Duncan, contemplating the recently executed Thane of Cawdor, declares ‘There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face’ (1.4.11–12), 1 he states the central problem the opacity of other minds poses to those anxious to safeguard against treachery and sedition. As Katharine Eisaman Maus, Steven Mullaney, and others have amply demonstrated, the early modern stage persistently registered this potential for treason to lie hidden just beneath visible surfaces, and the problem of other minds, a pronounced concern across the ideological spectrum in early modern England, prompted considerable discussion over remedies, however inevitably flawed they may be, to the epistemological quandary upon which so much social contentment rested. 2 To this general consternation caused by others’ hidden dispositions, the more particular matter of intention posed unique challenges, for, if nothing else, it was capable of being constantly rewritten, recast in post-hoc rationalizations meant to alter perception of an otherwise apparently self- evident utterance or other performed deed. As with Falstaff explaining why he fled at Gad’s Hill (‘By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye, / Why, hear you, my masters, was it for me to kill the heir-apparent?’ (1HIV, 2.4.263–6)) or Lucio seeking to justify his mockery of the disguised Vincentio (‘Faith, my lord, I spoke it but according to the trick’ (MM 5.1.501-2)), intention provided a mechanism for potentially trans- forming transgression into innocence. In the case of equivocation, a mode of discourse made infamous by Father Garnet and well rehearsed in Shakespearean criticism, ‘the conscious intentions of the speaker’ even allowed for the pre-emptive alteration of an utterance’s meaning, fusing deception and piety in such a way as to admit a kind of ‘lying like truth’ (Mullaney (1995: 124)). An internal disposition only provisionally known by inference, intention proved crucial for understanding an agent’s performed acts and yet remained always uncertain, ever susceptible to continued refashioning; it required auditors’ close scrutiny, therefore, but also considerable latitude of interpretation. Without losing sight of the more negative valences unknowable intention carried within early modern culture, this essay will examine instead the ways in which the ambiguous intentions of others could also serve as a vehicle for – or at least present 11 SHAKESPEARE, INTENTION, AND THE ETHICAL FORCE OF THE INVOLUNTARY Christopher Crosbie